Yeah, Python's good to start off with. I use Java more, simply because I develop Android apps, and I didn't find it too hard to learn with Python knowledge.Learning to code is actually quite hard, and the language doesn't matter in the end - coding is a mindset, a way of thinking about things. It's easier for some people than others. Once you have the mindset down, learning a language is trivial - I learnt Java very quickly, but Python very slowly, because it was my first language. I'm not too keen on the platform-independent approach. I began app development with some Python experience, and started on a platform-independent IDE called Appcelerator. It used a Javascript runtime for its apps, which, as you can imagine, makes it use much more storage (the runtime was about 5MB) and quite a lot slower. I also found it a lot harder to do anything, because the documentation is weaker (as is the IDE itself - it's a customised version of Eclipse, and doesn't have any kind of layout editor). It's got less APIs than Android, certainly, and I'm sure less than iOS. It also makes the app look worse on both platforms.I lean towards the platform-specific approach. The differences between the platforms are enough to merit my software fitting seamlessly in with each - taking advantage of features, design motifs, etc. Especially now, with Modern UI in Windows 8 being so different to everything else, I'll definitely need to do a separate app for Windows.